Textile artist and animal lover

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Choupette

Today’s star is a fashion icon: Choupette Lagerfeld. She has featured on the blog before, and returns, because the photograph I took as my inspiration back in the early days (she was my first, my very first cat), stalks through my imagination. It is too perfectly beautiful – plus, you know, a cat who has 98,000 followers on Instagram, is a cat to butter up.

The Telegraph, a not unreputable paper here in the UK, says that she has two maids to wait upon her. Actually, they said she has two ladies in waiting, perhaps the maids are off somewhere doing the milking, along with the bodyguard and private vet who leap alongside in attendance. Choupette is, as they say, the cat that got the cream.

And here is my floral tribute, laid at her feet. As W.B.Yeats might have said under similar circumstances:

I have spread my machine-embroidered cloths under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Here she starts: a mere ghost in the paintbox. And it is a ghostly paintbox, too. It was my mother’s, and like her scarves, which till very recently, still held a trace of her scent, so this lid has buried in its layers of paint, some colours that were hers.

I could have stopped here. I still half wish I had, I think it might just be the perfect picture. But I was curious, and pushed on.

And here she is, all done.

Actually, truth be told, I did have another go at recapturing that early, wraithlike face, that haunted me, even as I sewed away from it. It proved elusive. But that’s another story, and besides, the wench is blue: